The visual premise of Matias Misael’s Headdy figures is not complicated: humanoid and cartoonishly endearing, the long-nosed, big-eyed characters feel – at first look – apt for a mid-range marketing campaign.

Still, there is a kind of visual remainder that is left: for all that the images seem to have been plucked from your local bank commercials – or indeed, were plucked from your local bank commercials – they also firmly demonstrate a sly, additional depth. The digital seeps into reality in ways that exceed the concentrated diegeses of marketing, and bleeds, at times disturbingly, into our lives.

I first came across Headdy in the ads of the Indonesian Bank Mandiri, and to be frank, I didn’t think much of them. They, as noted, seemed exactly the kind of googly-eyed humanoids that would be deployed to convince me of banking with one institution or another. But as I became more familiar with Misael’s work, and observed as the characters expanded well beyond the commercial environs, this kind of existential drift slid into the uncanny. It begged the question: where do mascots and other semi-worldly characters go when you’re not watching them?

The more I explored Headdy, the more muddled this question became. Headdy goes camping, but on a film set; reclines in luxury (rather fittingly under the delightfully nondescript heading “Classic”) at perfect scale, where everything seems to be tailored exactly for his body. The world Headdy occupies is a kind of half-sibling to the one we live in.

Such is the crux of the duality that often sits at the heart of marketing: the world of campaigns is mostly our own, yes, but with a little something extra, a kind of effervescent je ne sais quoi mixed in. Commercials and their characters exist in environments where every night out is the best night of your life — every day the most exciting, every sip the most refreshing. While it looks, sounds, and feels like our own, it is not. However, we are spared the queasy uncanniness of this realization when the bright logo flashes across the screen and we are directed to something else.

We don’t have the time to register that something isn’t quite right. It is at this last point that the genius of Headdy makes itself clear: these still, non-branded images give the viewer the opportunity to consider the strangeness of it all; the almost-but-not-quite-ness of the image.

All of this, however, exists in a broader digital art market context. At the minute, of the two NFTs that Misael has minted on platform Hic et Nunc, one (Flex) is currently available for 1 XTZ (roughly $5) as part of an edition of 25, of which 22 editions remain. As the market moves increasingly into an interest in the Figital – note the rise of photography NFTs and the ontological conundrum these present – it would seem that the Headdy project is one that could very much be of interest.

I have yet to become aware of any project that so thoroughly questions the uncanny valley that exists between the intersection of the real and digital, and perhaps there remains serious upside for the project financially. Or perhaps, unfortunately, Headdy may be relegated to the annals of marketing graphics.